Note: This is the redacted version of a resolution passed during the 2020 Conference which dismantled the national structure of the MCP-OC. The national structure which existed up to that point — any future national structure will be dictated by the concrete conditions of the Amerikan situation. The Party as it must exist is built by the work on the ground and line struggle between linked formations (FTPs, struggle committees, etc.). There is line struggle within the MCP-OC linked formations as there is within all Maoist formations. This is not a split. We discourage baseless speculation on the internet, and encourage the reader to contribute to the Party building effort by joining an FTP or support/initiate class struggle guided by the mass line.

We take as our point of departure that no vanguard proletarian class party exists in the so-called United States of Amerika. By class party we understand a political organization of a historically new type, unrelated to the “parties” of the bourgeois parliamentary system. The class party is a combat organization, composed of the most advanced sectors of the revolutionary mass movement and equipped with the partisan ideology of the revolutionary proletariat (ie, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism), with the sole purpose of initiating and leading a revolutionary struggle to obliterate the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and install a class dictatorship of the proletariat.

No currently existing organization meets these criteria. Any political formation in the so-called u.s.a. which calls itself a communist party is so in name only.

Recognizing this fact means understanding that the primary task for communist militants is the construction of the class party. Thus, the question at hand is the line of party construction. What is the relationship between the protracted organizational work of party construction and the mass work of party building? What does it mean to construct the vanguard of the mass movement, and what work is primary at this juncture?

One divides into two; the strategic line of party construction (our primary task) splits into two tasks (party building and party organizing).By party building, we mean intervention in the mass movement, going among the people and fighting alongside them with the goal of forming mass organizations independent of, and antagonistic to, the enemy class rule. This work, which we call mass work, is carried out by local revolutionary organizations which form the nucleus of the eventual party formation. Its focus should be to qualitatively advance the movement by sharpening the latent combativeness of the revolutionary masses into a razor edge, systematizing and centralizing the dispersed resistance of the mass struggle into a united front lead by the class line of the proletariat (ie, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism).

We refer to the most basic unit of organization at this stage as a struggle committee: an informal organization of tenants, workers, students, women, neighborhood organizers, etc., united around a specific site of struggle or against a specific class enemy. A local revolutionary collective should facilitate the development of such committees (“tenant councils” “worker committees,” etc.) in the sites of struggle in which they intervene, and use them to help the mass elements involved develop a program and plan of action for the struggle. Helping to organize these battles will develop new mass contacts, develop the leadership of militants in the revolutionary collective, and identify advanced mass elements for potential consolidation and recruitment.

Party organizing, on the other hand, refers to the work of uniting and consolidating existing revolutionary organizations – the nuclei of the pre-party formation – into a national party formation capable of leading the revolutionary struggle to higher stages and, eventually, initiating armed struggle against the bourgeois state. Thus, where party building work involves systematizing and centralizing mass struggles, party organizing involves systematizing and centralizing the organizing work of revolutionary organizations, transforming them into party cells.

The relationship between these two movements is basically concentric, with the broad masses as the outermost circle and the eventual central committee as the innermost, most advanced circle; it is for this reason that the communist party is referred to as the advanced (or vanguard) detachment of the revolutionary proletariat, and the line of party construction (the dialectic of party building and party organizing) is called the line of concentric construction.

The movement from the decentralized, protracted work of party building to the unity and centralization needed for party organizing passes through the sequence outlined by Mao: “unity – struggle – unity.” This means starting from a point of unity, resolving contradictions through criticism and struggle, to arrive at a new unity on a higher basis.

Therefore, while the line of concentric construction calls for an overall strategic tendency towards centralization, it nevertheless sets out from a period of decentralized and autonomous local work. Only a period of protracted struggle over line and methods of work, rooted in the shared experience of practical attempts at party building on the local level, can bring about the real unity necessary for organizing a national vanguard formation.

Skipping this phase amounts to attempting to construct the party from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. Premature centralization will ultimately foreclose the possibility of party construction in favor of a party in name only. It will put militants at risk of severe repression, and stunt the development of a real culture of democratic centralism by forging the organization on the basis of paper unity rather than a real unity arrived at through struggle.

We have already seen the damaging effects of premature attempts at party organizing with the collapse of the NCP-LC/OC, the dogmato-revisionism in command of other sectors of the Maoist movement, and in the errors endemic to the “NCM” era of struggle.

We have also begun to experience these effects within our own formation: despite considerable growth throughout 2020, practical centralization is entirely absent. Rather than systematizing and centralizing the work being done by our local organs, we have struggled to prematurely systematize our own work in order to give the appearance of centralization and worked frantically to develop a national orientation without sufficient work to pass beyond the “small-group left” errors of our respective local organizations.

A sober analysis of our situation shows that this is not for lack of effort – we need not redouble our attempts to centralize. Instead, we should struggle for the opposite, recognizing that any potential unity at which we might arrive in the future should be the product of protracted struggle over line and style of work.

We therefore call for the decentralization and dismantling of the national structure of the Organizing Committee for a Maoist Communist Party, in order for our formation to correctly correspond to the conditions in which we find ourselves, with the objective of redoubling our local efforts in order to arrive at a stronger unity on which to base a national organizing effort in the future.